Carbon Dysphoria
41 points by jamesnvc
41 points by jamesnvc
I don't dislike this post, because it clearly came from a place of care, but the more I read it, the more I felt like the author hyper-focused on a very certain subset of tech people and offered solutions that should be very obvious to anyone who's not part of this very certain subset.
When blockchain and NFTs are the hot new thing, everyone wants the bored ape, no matter how widely mocked the damned things are by wider society. When LLM coding agents are the new hot thing, everything that the engineering community previously said about engineering standards, testing and robustness suddenly goes out the window, and people who previously claimed that they enjoyed writing code and putting together computer systems themselves suddenly start claiming that they actually always found it boring and hateful and enjoy having the machine generate everything for them.
This quote in particular exasperated me severely. All of this shit was pushed by "techfluencers" and techbros, who hoped to profit riding on the coattails of billionaires. The greater tech community at large balked and/or laughed at them. Even LLMs which are arguably the most "positively received" of these is extremely divisive. Just look at this website or, hell, even something extremely mainstream as /r/programming.
Painting an entire profession umbrella as an homogeneous mass defeats any kind of point she was trying to make.
It's as though many people in the tech industry have no real desires at all beyond the desires that they're told to have by their wider social circles.
Most techies I know are just people. People who struggle, joke, get angry at times, have hobbies and vices. I don't know what sort of soul-sucking hellscape she frequent(s|ed), but I've never once met a corporate NPC like this.
And I understand my retorts are anecdotal, but so are hers.
In my experience, the wider evidence tends to support this.
Citation needed.
Many tech people have few to no interests outside of tech or computer gaming
Playing video-games is about as tech as eating a cake is baking. Not to mention, video games are a really broad category, ranging from stuff that exercises accuracy and reflexes, to games that are all about thinking. So what she calls a single hobby is really several barely overlapping ones.
The existence of soylent suggests that a significant minority of tech people don't even really like or enjoy food all that much.
Or that some people bought into the "food of the future" idea. Or they just drink it for perceived health benefits. Or, hell, even enjoy it, who are we to judge? Or whatever.
Drawing such a strong conclusion for the fact that a crappy drink exists and people drink it is a bit too much.
Elon Musk and the other tech oligarchs are, as always, the prototypical examples of this.
Comparing the Average Joe to a billionaire/oligarch and drawing conclusions about the former feels very misguided to me. Especially when it comes to Musk. I feel like few (outside techbros) aspire to be like him.
there are the people in the tech world who take care to look after themselves, but in a weirdly detached, depersonalised way: they go to the gym and dress in certain ways primarily to express their masculinity and do what the general opinion tells them to do rather than out of any real care for their bodies or how they want to look.
This is not tech-specific. Social media and influencers have done a lot of damage to young peoples' self perception.
getting paid to write software means, to a greater or lesser extent, conforming yourself to the value systems of someone like Peter Thiel, who clearly has something deeply wrong with him.
Most workplaces aren't the Gestapo Inc. Sure, no multinational is squeaky clean, but there is a huge gap between "engaged in corruption and occasional fraud" vs "provides the firmware to bomb children".
I will not begrudge anyone for taking a job at a morally dubious employer to protect their own livelihood, but if you choose to work at a "bad company", with other options present, then it's not "the tech industry in general pressuring you to behave and think in deeply inhuman ways", it's you not valuing the results of your work, over the paycheck you receive.
I could go on. As I've mentioned in the beginning, I sympathize with the author. The messages of "be aware of your body and its needs" and "take care of yourself" are universally good (arguably so is "screw the tech grifters, who leech on our profession").
But I really can't help, but think this whole piece was written from a dark place and I hope that when her illness passes and she transitions completely, she'll see the world in a slightly more positive light. Techies are people, not a singular mass of drones. And we're all gonna make it.
Many tech people have few to no interests outside of tech or computer gaming
Playing video-games is about as tech as eating a cake is baking. Not to mention, video games are a really broad category, ranging from stuff that exercises accuracy and reflexes, to games that are all about thinking. So what she calls a single hobby is really several barely overlapping ones.
I'm also genuinely struggling to think of a single colleague of mine for whom that statement is true. Like, of all the colleagues I've ever had, I can't really think of any for whom that statement would be accurate. Maybe this is a cultural thing, maybe the author mingles in a different circle of developers, but I really can't relate much of what they're saying to the developers that I actually know in person.
Even amongst the very loud tech-y people who are very present on social media, lots of em are at least big bike users or going to the gym or things like that as well. This might just be that the author is hanging around people in their early 20s more than anything. At one point social dynamics mean you end up with other hobbies too.
The thing about nerds is that they tend to get "too" into something. What that something is is almost beside the point
Beautiful article. I've been doing yoga daily for over a year now, and getting more in touch with my body has revealed desires, wants, and values gaps in ways that I would have never guessed at the beginning.
Critical thinking about values systems and exercising choice about what I work on is something I struggle with daily, but has only served to improve my overall health and happiness, despite the discomfort it takes to do that kind of deep work.
So many of us, especially those raised male in western countries, are not taught how to deal with uncomfortable emotions, or how to locate and feel emotions in the first place. It took me years of therapy to be able to understand that feelings are actually felt in the body, and that I can connect those to desires, and then state those desires to others so that my needs are taken into account when making decisions.
Interesting article! There are some ideas that I will have to mull over – the whole "actually being good at the act of producing working software requires you to have personality traits that are considered unmasculine and that are in fact somewhat feminine" angle puts some of my experiences into a new perspective.
The generalizations in the article are a bit off-putting though. Maybe SW dev work here in Europe or Germany is different than in New Zealand, but in my experience most (90%) of SW devs here are not very different from the average academic – maybe more tech-affine, and the gender disparity is noticeable, but in my experience most SW workers here did not care about NFTs or blockchain, and care about AI only because it is really difficult to escape from that topic.
Does the author dare to buy the premise put into the title, though?
Like, if one believed in literally clade dysphoria, if one believed that for everyday convenience I act slightly more «human» than I'd like to, which is why I went into vaguely-math and then into Computer Science in the first place — exactly because of inhuman logic! — what would be that idea about «opera outings» if not «pass better»?